Kim 671little interest in tracing his roots—though he speaks
vaguely of a “Red Bull and a Colonel,” along with
“nine hundred devils” who will whisk him off to his
destiny. This confusion of his racial identity (the
Red Bull was the emblem of his father’s regiment,
and the 900 devils his brothers in arms) is the first
time we realize that our native guide is playing an
even greater game than he realizes.
If we read Kim as the story of a boy’s adoles-
cence, then Kim comes of age under the tutelage
of two mentors: the Teshoo lama, a Buddhist
pilgrim seeking a fabled river, and Mahbub Ali, a
horse-dealer who is secretly an agent of the British
empire. While the lama believes that Kim is his
chela, or spiritual aide, Mahbub marks him out as
the prize “colt” to be broken into the subterfuge of
the Great Game. Throughout the novel, Kim tee-
ters between these wildly disparate worlds, in awe
of the lama’s devotion but longing for the “dignity
of a letter and a number—and a price upon his
head!” which Mahbub’s profession could bring him.
His confusion is compounded when he is discov-
ered by his father’s regiment, which sends him to a
mission school to become a proper Sahib. As a boy
of English pedigree—however dubious—he has a
racial imperative to become English in language,
manners, and thought. Yet the great irony is that he
is cultivated by Mahbub, Lurgan Sahib, and other
functionaries because of his ability to be other than
English; in essence, his ability to be “the Friend of
all the World,” blending in everywhere, and going
where no Englishman can travel. When the lama
learns the truth of his heritage, he exclaims: “A
Sahib and the son of a Sahib . . . But no white man
knows the land and the customs of the land as thou
knowest. How comes it this is true?” In other words,
can a “Sahib” truly see India as an Indian? Can a
man live in both worlds, being a proper Englishman
even while he salaams among Muslims on a secret
mission?
Kim’s crisis of identity is expressed in one of the
most remarked upon passages in the novel. When
he becomes a free agent of the Game, able to live or
die by its fortunes, Kim reflects: “Now am I alone—
all alone . . . In all India is no one so alone as I! . . .
Who is Kim—Kim—Kim?” The repetition of his
name is telling: The name is not familiar to him,
nor is his identity as a secret agent, using India as
a disguise (something artificial) when the “disguise”
simply comes naturally to him. Kim constantly has
to remind himself: “One must never forget that one
is a Sahib, and that some day . . . one will command
natives.” Yet these Peter Pan-like dreams of adven-
ture and entitlement are shattered when he views
India not as a thing to be mapped and collected (the
Game), but as a timeless, sentient world. Though
the novel closes with Kim’s career still uncertain, we
cannot forget the passages when Kim “sees” himself
in its diversity and abundance: “This was seeing the
world in real truth; this was life as he would have
it—bustling and shouting, the buckling of belts, and
beating of bullocks and creaking of wheels, lighting
of fires and cooking of food, and new sights at every
turn of the approving eye . . . India was awake, and
Kim was in the middle of it, more awake and more
excited than anyone.”
Joshua GrassonationaliSm in Kim
Kipling once said that “India will never stand
alone,” suggesting that an India without Britain
could never exist. In many ways, Kim is the literary
expression of this statement, as Kipling’s India is a
British India, whose hero, for all his native insight,
is racially English. Throughout Kim, the idea of
nationalism works in several ways, defining the
British against the so-called “Oriental” character, as
well as Britain’s rival, Russia, which seeks to invade
India in the “Great Game” of empire. We see this
early in the novel, when Mahbub Ali reflects that
“Kim could lie like an Oriental.” The narrator
also delivers winking asides about the customs of
Indians, to whom “All hours of the twenty four are
alike,” suggesting how the punctual English trav-
eler is frustrated at every turn. The effect of these
passages is curious; while they can easily be read as
racist, it is important to separate the rhetoric from
the narrator and his technique. Kipling’s strat-
egy is an uneasy way of maintaining his national
ethos while writing of worlds and people that
only a native could know; he keeps them at arm’s
length, drawing from a fund of Oriental lore that
allows him to remain safely “English” in his exotic
narrative.